The Best Things I’ve Read This Week: 5.17.15

A Prayer for Owen Meany -“Owen Meany is a dwarfish boy with a strange voice who accidentally kills his best friend’s mom with a baseball and believes—accurately—that he is an instrument of God, to be redeemed by martyrdom.”

In Flight: En route from London to Tokyo, a pilot’s eye view of life in the sky. -“At about 30 feet above the surface of Japan I pull the nose up and begin to close the thrust levers. I feel that moment of poise: a sense that continued flight is as likely as anything else, that we have lowered the wheels but they are not yet turning upon the Earth, that a question has been asked but not answered.”

Why Some Men Pretend to Work 80-Hour Weeks -“Our email program has a time client built into it. So you can actually see in your email box who’s online and who’s not. And there’s an implicit culture [here] that if you don’t see somebody on at the same time at a certain hour of the night, you’re wondering what the heck they are doing.”